Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself.
Quoted in the Penguin English Dictionary under "delusion". The quotation is taken out of its context by the editors of the Penguin English Dictionary. It is from Phillip E. Johnson, a creationist, who is at the forefront of anti-Darwinism in North America. However, the aphorism above is a wonderfully succinct way of capturing one implication from the theory and results of primate sociobiology.
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Science is perhaps the only human activity in which errors are systematically criticised and ...in time corrected
- Karl Popper
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Only daring speculation can lead us further, not an accumulation of facts
- Albert Einstein
Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind
- Imre Lakatos
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For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
involves no trigonometry
-Frederick Soddy
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It isn't enough to talk about peace.
One must believe in it.
And it isn't enough to believe in it.
One must work at it.
-Eleanor Rooseveldt
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It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead
-Rose Macaulay
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Time is Einstein's way of keeping things from happening at once
-Zak Van Straaten
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Time is god's way of keeping things from happening at once
- Anonymous graffiti seen in Texas
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A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with
- Tennessee Williams
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The English are not a very spiritual people. So they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity
- George Bernard Shaw
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Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve
- George Santayana
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There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy
- Jonathan Swift
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Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born
- Robert Merton
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Every dogma must have its day
- H.G. Wells
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Each dogma must in the fullness of time, - perish
- Zak Van Straaten
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I am very interested in the the Universe, I am specialising in the Universe and all that surrounds it
- Peter Cook
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I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated
- Poul Anderson
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It seemed to me a superlative thing - to know the explanation of everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes, why it is
- Socrates
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The historian is a prophet looking backwards
- August von Schlegel
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Sometimes truth comes riding into history on the back of error
- Reinhold Niebuhr
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Not all who wander are lost
- J.R. Tolkien
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All we can do is search for the falsity content of our best theory
- Karl Popper
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They were using me the way drunks use lampposts; in other words more for support than illumination
- Christopher Hitchens, My Red-State Odyssey
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- Christopher Hitchens, in My Red-State Odyssey, on self pitying wails from Country Music singers;
If you play one of these backwards...you eventually get sober, and then you get your car, you dog and your wife back.
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I would rather have a worse wine if it had more to say
- from The Diarist
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A discreet Facebook absence is preferable to a discrete Facebook presence
- Zak Van Straaten 2008
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Scientific medicine may be defined as the set of practices which submit to the intellectual ordeal of being tested
- Richard Dawkins
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Californians are people who kill rattlesnakes when they see them in case they hurt someone else
- Joan Didion: Where I was from 2004
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A business school must communicate effectively the struggle - the disappointments as well as the triumphs of the struggle - to produce out of the chaos of human experience some grain of order won by the intellect
-from "The Brains Business" in The ECONOMIST 2007
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H2O has a two thirds majority
- attribution ?
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A philosophy major who is gainfully employed.
One of the most elusive urban myths
- from about.com (May 2008)
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Clever people should get their ideas from people even cleverer than they are.
- Montaigne (Essays 1595)
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
- Alain de Botton; - summarising Montaigne's philosophy (The Consolations of Philosophy, 2000)
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If you are a code mathematician, here is a Yodaism on the tricky subject of mutation.
Assignment leads to mutation. Mutation leads to pointers. Pointers lead to suffering!
- Anton van Straaten (2001)
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Si, abbiamo un anima. Ma e fatta di tanti piccoli robot.
Yes, we have a soul. But it's made of lots of tiny robots.
- Giulio Giorelli
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What you are is an assemblage of roughly a hundred trillion cells, of thousands of different sorts.
- Daniel Dennett in Freedom Evolves
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Each of your host cells is a mindless mechanism, a largely autonomous micro-robot......Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
- Daniel Dennett in Freedom Evolves
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Following Erdos' line of thought - "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems" - I know a Cape Town composer who is on a diet but is allowed to eat endless handfuls of raisins. For her its probably true that -
a musician is a machine for turning raisins into songs
Even if its not true in this world, it ought to be true in all possible worlds that,
a logician is a machine for turning New York baked cheesecake into proofs!
It is true for some code mathematician (a computer programmer) living in the New York area that,
a code mathematician is a machine for turning duck into code!
For some business consultants in the Cape Town area its definitely true that,
a business consultant is a machine for turning tea into strategy
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You think philosophy is difficult, but I tell you, it is nothing compared to the difficulty of being a good architect.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who took time out to design and build a house for his sister in Vienna. The outcome of his architectural work can charitably be described as "messy". Wittgenstein found it easier to "Talk about talk" (one of his infamous definitions of his kind of philosophy). And again, charitably, his Philosophical Investigationscan only be described as "messy".
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"A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady,
"but it's turtles all the way down!""
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, 1988.
Compare that to the answer to the problem of what created the universe, or what created the deity that created the universe, and of course what created that, etc.
It's watchmakers all the way up.
- David C. Ross writing on Slashdot.org 2007
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Mistaking causality can lead to an unwarranted philosophical fluffing of tail feathers...
I recoil, overcome with the glory of my rosy hue and the knowledge that I, a mere cock, have made the sun rise.
- Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), French poet, playwright. Chanticler, in The Chanticler, act 2, sc. 3.
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Freedom is better than non-freedom
- Dmitry Medvedev, president of Russia (2008) (from the context of utterance; - this applies to personal and economic freedoms and freedom of speech. (The ECONOMIST, March 1, 2008)
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On the mind, consciousness or the soul:
The comforting and tenacious idea that the body has an imperishable occupant is a wonderful fiction
- Adam Zeman in A Portrait of the Brain, 2008.
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A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
- Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained, 1991)
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A blogger is just a web page's way of making another web page.
- Zak Van Straaten (1994)
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My formula for success is rise early, work late and strike oil.
- JP Getty
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Good things when short are twice as good.
- Gracian (1647)
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A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.
-Henry Thoreau
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.
- Aristotle
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Success usually comes to those who are too busy to go looking for it.
- Henry Thoreau
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Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.
- Elizabeth Bibesco
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I wake up each morning determined to change the world
and also to have one hell of a good time.
Sometimes that makes planning the day a little difficult.
- E.B. White
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There are no short cuts to any place worth going to.
Anon
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If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.
- George S Patten
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If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.
- Aristotle Onassis.
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Only two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity and I am not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein (found on the www. I have not been able to trace this to an Einstein published source.)
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Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
- Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
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Success is the child of audacity.
- Benjamin Disraeli
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Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
- Sydney Smith
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The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular reason for being happy, except that they are so.
- W.R. Inge
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It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one’s doubts.
- G.B. Burgin
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But the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are "always on" all too often end up - mentally - anywhere but here (wherever here may be)
- anonymous journalist at The ECONOMIST April 12, 2008, gets philosophical about the WiFi nomads who roam the world carrying only a Blackberry (or smartphone) and a laptop.
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The Earth laughs in flowers
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An interesting attitude to travel
Horace's philosophy of travel.
Horace was no traveler. "For him the tranquil delights of his farm near Licenza in the Sabine hills, his poetry, his library, his excellent wine cellar, his friends and the occasional dancing girl are all that a man could possibly desire. His one trip abroad to study in Athens, was not a success. He was lured by Brutus into military action, fought ingloriously at the battle of Philippi and was glad to get back to Rome."
Lone Traveller; one woman, two wheels and the world by Anne Mustoe, p. 209. Virgin, London 2000.
Those who rush across the sea change their skies, not their souls.
Horace (65 - 8 BC. Latin poet and satirist)
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Random Observations
There's a new Darwin. His name is Edward O. Wilson
Tom Wolfe in Sorry but your soul just died 1996
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The Fundamental property of Venice
Henry James wrote:
"almost every one interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which today, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its unwritten history.
The deposed, defeated, the disenchanted, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give." (Italian Hours, 1909)
Marcel Proust ("When I went to Venice, I discovered that my dream had become - incredibly, but quite simply - my address") (1925) and Thomas Mann (Death in Venice, 1912) found the same atmosphere of transience and decay which caused them to be enchanted by it. So of course did Palladio, Tiepolo, Titian, Tintoretto, Renoir, Turner, Signac, Delacroix...the list goes on and on...
Its something that a visitor to Venice picks up on during her/his first progress down the Grand Canal, or never understands...